ON POLITICS

ON POLITICS; When the Party Says The Party's Over

By IVER PETERSON

Published: June 11, 1995

TRENTON—
Next Thursday 42 more or less conflicted men and women will gather at the Princeton Marriott to perform an unpleasant task, which is to dump an old and proven friend on orders from a relative newcomer who nevertheless has a hot streak going.

The state Republican Committee, a man and a woman from each of the counties, will be asked by the relative newcomer, Governor Whitman, to replace Virginia Littell as party chairman at the expiration of her term on June 30, and put in Chuck Haytaian, the Assembly Speaker who has conquered all the narrow worlds of the Assembly and is looking for something new to do. Something that pays.

The Governor does not have a vote on the committee, but she has the numbers: a voter approval rating of about 60 percent and plenty of helpful chatter going on about her potential as a national leader. Mr. Haytaian has the moxie of a political boss, completely dominating his chamber and the Senate President, Donald T. DiFrancesco, and punishing any Republicans who stray from the line he has set.

And Ginny Littell? What does she have?

"My name is Virginia Marie Regina Newman Littell, and not one of those names is spelled F-I-D-O," says the party chairman -- not chairwoman, please. "Because I don't roll over and play dead for anyone."

That is as close as Mrs. Littell has come to saying whether or not she will defy the Governor, call in the I.O.U.'s of 30 years of party work and put her name in for a second term against Mr. Haytaian next Thursday. Whether she does or does not -- she says she might -- the fight for the leadership of the state party has at least made one thing clear: in a state where the Democrats are nonplayers, Republicans are left to play among themselves.

When Mrs. Littell's husband, Bob, told his wife more than 30 years ago that he wanted to run for the State Assembly, she thought at first it was something to do with the church. The General Assembly, he explained. O.K., she said, but don't forget me.

"I told him I'd support him, but I did not want to become a non-person, the candidate's wife," she recalled last week. "I wanted to be an individual."

So she ran for the Sussex County Republican Committee in the days when Webster Todd was the state chairman and his daughter Christie was still in college. During the day she sold stoves and refrigerators at Littell's TV and Appliances, the family business in Sparta -- "I don't cook, but I can tell you a lot about stoves" -- and at night she did the party work. She rose to state committee member, then to state treasurer, and finally, in 1992, to the only job she had wanted all along.

You might think that being party chairman when Mrs. Whitman became Governor in 1993, and when Republicans won a majority of the United States House seats from New Jersey for the first time in 40 years, would speak well of Mrs. Littell's tenure.

But with the election of the state's first woman governor came a shift in the generational politics in the state, and not least in the politics of gender. With the change, the old style of politics that Mrs. Littell embodies -- warm, personal, chatty and inviting -- was supplanted by Mrs. Whitman's cooler, more forbidding style of dealing with other politicians. Suddenly, Mrs. Littell's party-woman style looked dated, particularly to a younger women like Mrs. Whitman.

Mrs. Littell acknowledges the change, indirectly. "I'm really girlie-girlie," she said. "I never played the gender thing, which is just bull. I'd rather play it straight."

In contrast, Mrs. Whitman uses "the gender thing" freely, whether as a red flag to warn male critics away from womens' issues, or as a platform from which to take strategic offense at something someone said, or as a tent for gathering in the support of like-minded women.

So Mrs. Littell could not have been too surprised when the Governor told her, last March, that she wanted some changes in the party, starting at the top, and not so much as a face-saving appointment someplace else for Mrs. Littell.

That she would offer Mr. Haytaian $100,000 a year to do a job that Mrs. Littell does for free has astonished many Republicans in the State House, but then, Mrs. Whitman has long since let them know that they are only the supporting cast in her governorship.

For the record, Mrs. Whitman says only that she "wants to go in a new direction" with the party. Off the record, her advisers maintain that Mr. Haytaian has several desirable qualities. He is a bulldog in a business where the biggest dog raises the most money, a key function for party head; he is an adept political tactician, which is important, and a commanding leader, which may be less good in a business that values teamwork.

Some believe that the chairmanship was a sop to keep Mr. Haytaian from following through on noises he made in March about trying again for the United States Senate next year against Bill Bradley, after losing to a pallid Senator Frank Lautenberg last fall. Others think it is just a place for the Governor to park Mr. Haytaian until next April, when the job he really wants, the $175,000-a-year presidency of the Meadowlands' Sports and Exposition Authority, becomes hers to give.

And others think that Mr. Haytaian just wants to keep an oar in so that he can run for something else -- Governor? the House? -- down he road.

But nobody thinks he wants to stay for long in the only job Mrs. Littell ever wanted, and that is why, next Thursday, 42 more or less conflicted men an women may face a tough choice.